I don't know if blog posts on their own are the way forwards - they will generate some more traffic but will that traffic stay, and repeat visit? I think the forums need some more activity, then we have a chance of snagging some people who will stick around and in turn help get more visitors

Cicero wrote:"Neither can embellishments of language be found without arrangement and expression of thoughts, nor can thoughts be made to shine without the light of language"

Thanks for the stats. I always love to get to see stats. Based on the numbers, the issue doesn't seem to be a lack of people coming to the site or a lack of people who know about the site. It seems to be more of a lack active topics for people to blog about. Maybe I'll try to think of topics that I think are interesting to try to stir things up a bit. Granted, the things that I'm interested in tend to have narrow appeal.

Roy is right.All of the search engines know that we are here. We just don't have the traffic (yet) or the funds needed to push ourselves up to the front page of their search results. Also, I think it takes some sort of special tweak to the software to show when their bots are present, and we don't currently have that.

If you frequently visit Apositive it is worth keeping an eye on the portal page because we have an automated feed there that provides links to just about any article or blog that mentions asexuality. It is updated almost every single day, sometimes several times a day. Lots of interesting stuff!

From my knowledge of how to "Google Bomb," one of the best ways to move up the search engine ranks is simply to link here from other pages. Google's algorithm takes into account links to a site, so the more links we have going here the more noteworthy it becomes to Google.

Maybe breaking the index into more sections would help... after all we might be asexuals but we have a huge variety of other interrests. I for one dont necessarily want to talk about asexuality itself all the time, certainly not everyday, probably not even every week. But I do want to hang around with other asexuals at least a few times a week... so much talk about other things is the main draw.

For instance when I was a member on AVEN, I posted a great deal in the 'philosophy and politics' forum.

"We only half live when we only half think." Voltaire (1694-1778)‘Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.’ Jean-Paul Sartre

Good to see you 'round these parts, Heligan!(I always read from the bottom up, so this is the first post I have seen from you.)

I really appreciate your input! Our focus is slightly different from AVEN's since we are striving to collect and save as much factual information about asexuality as possible, and we are also geared toward a slightly more mature audience. (I hate to say "older" since I think that actual age is less important than mental and emotional maturity.)I hope you will feel at home here. Diversifying the index section is one possibility that we have been considering, but there are some other ideas floating around as well.Finding the time and figuring out how to implement them is another matter altogether.

Given that more traffic could mean a 102 site becoming a 101 site with countless imbacile and infantile posts is that really what we want or do people think a higher turn over of posts is more important than quality?

I think apositives fortay is that it seems to be a higher standard, more mature and whilst still enjoying some humour is a more respective site

So for me to increase traffic we need to use those strengths/positives in it's promotion

dare I say the F word...facebook ..do we have an apositive facebook page.....seems brand awareness improves when you are on that place too?

also..whilst the other place has the biggest audience ..many sites for long term and mature asexuals although smaller do exist..I wonder if the site owners/admins of other asexual sites get together from time to time to promote each others sites and to promote the general asexual message?

Good points, Disjointed.I am like you in having mixed feelings about attracting TOO many members, especially those who would only be here to socialize. I am not entirely opposed to socializing, though, and even some silliness is fine with me - in moderation. On the offhand chance that anybody should ever notice that we actually DO have a section of this forum set aside for silliness, and - even more shocking - if they should start to seriously USE it, I have already decided that I will prune away the older posts in any threads that get absurdly long and/or ridiculous. Save's bandwidth, and all that, ya know.

Hehehe ... Facebook. Oy. As far as I know, we don't have a Facebook page. I honestly never thought of making one. I am on there quite a bit, actually, playing Birdland for the most part, but I wouldn't consider myself to be a very hardcore Facebook user. I wonder what types of people would find this place through a FB link? Interesting idea. I will definitely think about it.

I don't know about the owners/admins of the other asexy sites. Speaking only for myself, I have joined all of the other asexual sites that I know about, mainly just to offer a show of solidarity. I don't think that the favor has been returned, at least not to my knowledge. I know that DJ is aware of this site's existence and has deliberately chosen to be no part of it. I'm not sure what his reasoning is, but it is his decision and I won't try to second-guess him. I can only take responsibility for my own decisions.

When the 'Criminal Minds Fanatic ' website was getting started, we were asked to keep doing a 'search' for it because that pushed it up the listings...now don't know if I remember it right. Perhaps someone who knows better would be able to say...I wouldn't mind doing regular searches if it would help

You lose nothing when fighting for a cause ... In my mind the losers are those who don't have a cause they care about. - Muhammad Ali

I have no idea whether it would help or not, but it would be awesome if you want to take the time to do it, Tan. I vaguely recall something about that effect from search engines, but I'm not sure precisely how it works. Definitely worth a try, though. Thanks for the offer of help! I keep thinking that we just have to reach a certain critical mass and then things will take off by themselves. Maybe I'm just being silly, (maybe? HA!) but I have seen a very gradual increase in traffic since I have been here, so I am staying optimistic.

My understanding of the Google algorithm (which could be mistaken) says searching for a-positive will not increase it's rank. Linking to it, however, will. "Google bombing" works by creating many links to a site alongside keywords, and that tends to get a page up in the ranks awfully fast. Google has changed their algorithms to combat this, but it is still a key to climbing in search rank.

Doing searches does work to improve rankings, by doing this: - Do searches on keywords related to Apositive for which we want Apositive to be highly ranked- Every time, go through the results until finding Apositive and clicking on it and only on it.

That tells the search engine that this site is the most relevant result for that search and thus will (eventually) make it appear higher on the results page, if a lot of people do that often enough.

Search engines do not use only one algorithm, but many. Google Search uses several hundreds, both for retrieving relevant pages and ranking them. The number of links is still used, but now they focus a lot on user feedback and thus on what users consider relevant to their query (which results they click on) to improve rankings.

(I wrote a mini research thesis about search engines in the first year of my master's program in Information Management. I'm no expert, but I've learned a lot about search engines.)